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chapter 15 A Closing Door That Wasn’t There Before I n four upcoming film deals with the New Hollywood, Mancini would feel so betrayed that he would wish seriously to have his name removed from being credited at all. First was the salacious Blake Edwards romp Skin Deep (1989) about an alcoholic LA writer who plows his way through a list of sexual encounters (including a famously crude gag about glow-in-the-dark condoms), trying to thwart a bad case of writer’s block. Even though the main character, played by John Ritter, has a preference for the songs of Cole Porter, what we got on the soundtrack was another gallery of 1980s pop records, Edwards having jettisoned the brief pop song and other music that Mancini had already written for the film. Mancini wanted out, but the studio insisted on holding him to his onscreen credit: “Original music by . . .” Next was the Bill Cosby family film Ghost Dad (1990), directed by Sidney Poitier. Certainly Poitier, one of the late twentieth century’s great film stars, had directed reliable pictures before, and Cosby had been a staple of stand-up comedy and groundbreaking television roles for decades. Who knows where Ghost Dad went wrong? After audience previews and one step away from the studio’s signing off on it, after it was all scored and promoted, someone decided it had to be revamped. As with Lifeforce, by the time these secondguessers had come into the screening room to tear things apart, Mancini had already moved on. No one had much enthusiasm left for this anachronistic film anyway; they were not about to adapt Mancini’s existing score recordi -xii_1-286_Caps.indd 216 2/10/12 2:46 PM A Closing Door That Wasn’t There Before 217 ings, redistribute them throughout the film, and try them in different places to bridge the new gaps and cuts. Forget it. Better to just span the holes with some continuous beats and some imported records by, well, anybody. The denigration was still painful to Mancini months afterward. “The point is that most of the stuff that’s in the picture is not mine. The situation had to do with their deciding to use temporary tracks at various places instead of composed music, and I was not comfortable with all that. It was probably the biggest fiasco that I’ve ever encountered.”1 The plot for Ghost Dad, which is one of the film’s systemic problems, probably looked okay on paper. Cosby played an overworked businessman, a widower whose habit had been to narrate bedtime stories into a tape recorder for his young kids to play back at night while he was away. At least he could be present while absent. When suddenly he dies in a taxicab accident, he takes to haunting his household with reassurances and fatherly advice from beyond the grave. But there is another contrivance: somehow in the cosmic scheme of things, he is only allotted a few days to arrange an inheritance that will support his family, some earthly plan to provide for them once he has crossed. The awkward mix of that family warmth through Cosby’s humor, the confusing story with its macabre implications, and the self-conscious special effects was something that the producers never managed to clarify. Mancini’s instincts were correct from the beginning, though. The score he gave them did not try to underline the already clichéd family life on screen; its main theme derived its form from three layers: synthesizer and bass guitar repeating the basic chord pattern, a funk guitar blended with a double-time rhythm waiting for the main melody, and the tune itself on ARP—an intriguing concoction, illusive and indistinct, with a chromatic outline that keeps shifting. Slow meanderings and suspensions of this musical material were to underscore a number of dialogue and spooky action scenes, but only a few cues of such scoring are left in the film as it was released. EWI flute and belllike details still lie behind Dad’s tape-recorded good-nights. Soprano sax, passed to alto, plays a mellow theme under the family’s first realization that Dad has returned to them as a spirit and that perhaps in this way they are still parented. Strings, on the edge of tenderness, join that moment until a phantom electric organ enters warily, trading phrases with the alto sax. The family urges their ghost dad to communicate directly with them...

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